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Visitors to Tate Modern are used to unexpected encounters in its spacious Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down helter skelters, and witnessed AI-powered sea creatures drifting through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be engaging themselves in the complex nose chambers of a reindeer. The newest artist commission for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi creator Máret Ánne Sara—invites visitors into a labyrinthine structure based on the enlarged inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Inside, they can wander around or relax on skins, tuning in on headphones to Sámi elders telling stories and insights.

The Significance of the Nose

Why the nose? It could seem playful, but the installation pays tribute to a obscure scientific wonder: researchers have uncovered that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can raise the temperature of the incoming air it inhales by 80°C, enabling the creature to survive in inhospitable Arctic climates. Scaling the nose to human-scale dimensions, Sara explains, "generates a perception of inferiority that you as a individual are not dominant over nature." She is a ex- writer, children's author, and environmental activist, who is from a herding family in the far north of Norway. "Perhaps that creates the possibility to shift your outlook or spark some modesty," she adds.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding design is part of a elements in Sara's engaging commission celebrating the heritage, knowledge, and beliefs of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Traditionally mobile, the Sámi number approximately 100,000 people spread across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and the Russian Arctic (an territory they call Sápmi). They have experienced discrimination, forced assimilation, and suppression of their dialect by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an animal at the heart of the Sámi mythology and creation story, the work also highlights the people's struggles connected to the climate crisis, land dispossession, and external control.

Symbolism in Materials

On the extended access slope, there's a looming, 26-meter structure of reindeer hides trapped by electrical wires. It serves as a analogy for the governance and financial structures restricting the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part spiritual ascent, this part of the installation, titled Goavve-, refers to the Sámi term for an severe climatic event, whereby dense coatings of ice appear as varying conditions liquefy and ice over the snow, locking in the reindeers' main cold-season food, moss. The condition is a result of global heating, which is occurring up to much more rapidly in the Polar region than elsewhere.

A few years back, I traveled to see Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi pastoralists on their Arctic vehicles in chilly conditions as they transported trailers of food pellets on to the wind-scoured Arctic plains to provide through labor. These animals surrounded round us, scratching the slippery ground in futility for lichen-covered morsels. This costly and labour-intensive process is having a significant influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' independence. Yet the alternative is starvation. When such conditions become routine, reindeer are perishing—some from starvation, others drowning after sinking in streams through prematurely melting ice. On one level, the art is a tribute to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm transporting the condition to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also underscores the sharp divergence between the western view of electricity as a asset to be harnessed for economic benefit and survival and the Sámi outlook of life force as an inherent life force in creatures, humans, and land. This venue's legacy as a industrial facility is linked with this, as is what the Sámi consider eco-imperialism by regional governments. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, these states have disagreed with the Sámi over the building of wind energy projects, water power facilities, and extraction sites on their ancestral land; the Sámi assert their legal protections, incomes, and traditions are endangered. "It's challenging being such a small minority to defend yourself when the reasons are based on global sustainability," Sara comments. "Extractivism has appropriated the discourse of ecology, but still it's just attempting to find alternative ways to persist in practices of consumption."

Individual Struggles

She and her kin have themselves conflicted with the Norwegian government over its ever-stricter regulations on reindeer management. Previously, Sara's sibling undertook a set of unsuccessful court actions over the required reduction of his herd, supposedly to stop excessive feeding. In support, Sara developed a extended collection of creations titled Pile O'Sápmi comprising a massive screen of 400 cranial remains, which was displayed at the the show Documenta 14 and later acquired by the public gallery, where it resides in the entrance.

The Role of Art in Activism

Among the community, art seems the sole realm in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|